City may ask Rancho del Oro residents to approve fee to pay for streetlights

lighting-tax district proposed

Homeowners in Oceanside’s Villages of Rancho Del Oro who have been battling to have new streetlights installed in their neighborhood could tax themselves to pay for lights under a plan proposed by City Manager Peter Weiss.

Weiss said the plan, which he will present to the City Council on Wednesday, is the city’s final attempt to resolve a dispute that has festered since December 2010, when city crews began removing some of the community’s 635 decorative streetlights because they had become so rusted that they were in danger of falling down.

“If the residents turn it down and say no, we’ve pretty much exhausted the process,” Weiss said.

The city in February won a lawsuit in which the Villages of Rancho Del Oro Association homeowners group tried to force the city to pay the estimated $2.2 million cost to replace the streetlights.

Vista Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Stern ruled that the city was under no obligation to replace the rusting lights.

The judge found that the developer agreed back in the 1980s that Rancho Del Oro residents would be responsible for the lights if the city allowed him to install decorative lights with metal poles instead of the standard concrete poles the city uses.

Because they rust, the metal poles last about 20 years compared to about 50 years for concrete poles, city officials said.

Weiss said he’s offered a compromise to Prescott Management, the management company that oversees the Villages of Rancho Del Oro, but the company wasn’t interested.

A representative for Prescott Management declined to discuss the matter.

Weiss said the city offered to pay half the cost of replacing streetlights on major streets in the development, with the homeowners paying the full cost of streetlights on side streets.

Under the plan he will present to the council, the city would create a special lighting assessment district — if Rancho Del Oro residents agree — to cover all the streetlights in the neighborhood. Residents would vote on the plan in a special mail ballot.

“All of the homeowners would then have the opportunity to either approve or reject taxing themselves to replace the lights,” Weiss said. “It would be on their property tax bill.”

The tentative idea would be to issue bonds to pay for the lights, which would be paid off over 20 years by annual assessments on Rancho Del Oro homeowners, Weiss said.

The annual assessment would be roughly about $50 per homeowner, Weiss said. He said the city would hire a consultant to determine the exact amount of the assessment.

Rancho Del Oro resident Don Steiner said he’d like to take another look at the compromise Weiss offered before agreeing to tax himself.

If forming the assessment district is the best option, Steiner said he could go along with it as long as the replacement lights are made to last and aren’t “the same rinky-dink lights they put in 20 years ago.”

“Would I be willing to pay for street lighting? Yeah, I would,” Steiner said.

Weiss said the replacement streetlights he’s suggesting are concrete but shaded so they’re a little more decorative than the city’s standard streetlights.

Neighborhood resident John Hacker said he lives in a newer section of the Villages of Rancho Del Oro where the streetlights aren’t rusting. The lights are metal but they’re set in concrete bases so they’re less likely to rust, Hacker said.

“Our lights are fine. It’s the ones that were put in the ’80s that are failing,” Hacker said. He said he’s not too keen on creating an assessment district.

“We’re having to pay for lights other people put in and didn’t take care of and that’s not fair,” Hacker said.